Jeanette Sackett knew little about the start-and-stop investigation. As time passed, she had less and less contact with the department and with individual officers, including Jim’s old partners and friends, many of whom were beginning to retire and live off their pensions and relocate to lake places up north. She knew she could count on the department and whatever acquaintances remained if she got in a bind, but, all things considered, she could not escape the fact that her husband’s murder was for many people, if not for her and her children, becoming a remnant of distant history.
In May she would attend the department’s annual Memorial Day Service, when she and her kids gathered with other police families, department officials, and city dignitaries, and listen with shining eyes as Jim’s name was read aloud from the list of St. Paul officers who had died in the line of duty. Jim’s name was listed with the “Sr.” attached, to distinguish the father from Jim Jr., who by the mid-1990s had already lived longer than his dad. By May 1995, with the addition of John O’Brien, Ronald Ryan Jr., and Timothy Jones, the roster of St. Paul’s “fallen” had reached twenty-nine, and Sackett’s murder was the only one that was not closed. Before and after the ceremony, which was replete with bagpipes, a bugle, and the dolorous tolling of a ceremonial bell, old friends in their dress uniforms and black-banded shields would come by, offer hugs and handshakes, and inquire about the family. Someone might remark on how much Jim Jr. looked like his dad, depending on how Jim Jr. was wearing his hair. Once in a while someone would whisper something to Jeanette about a possible lead in the case, but not often. Officially, there was nothing new to report.
A few years after Jim’s death, Jeanette had married another St. Paul officer, but the marriage did not last long. When the kids were old enough to go to school, she took a part-time job at a downtown bank, applying the bookkeeping skills she’d learned in a Louisiana business school and enhanced with a refresher course in St. Paul. She always did her best, when the kids would ask, to explain what happened to their father on May 22, 1970. She would play the audio tape she recorded on Hague Avenue with Glen Kothe and open the scrapbook full of newspaper clippings about the murder and its investigation, though the dates on those clippings extended no further than the spring of 1972.
When Ryan and Jones were gunned down on that sparkling August morning in 1994, Jeanette was riven by a familiar shock, anger, and heartache, but she neither contacted nor was contacted by the new widows. She had been befriended by the wife of a Minnesota State Patrol officer who had been murdered during a traffic stop a few years before Jim was killed, and the two remained close for several years before the woman remarried and began a new life in Wisconsin. She had also enjoyed a friendship for a while with Joan O’Brien, John’s widow, after his death in the car wreck in 1981. But Jeanette was, or had become, a loner, focused on her kids and the bountiful garden behind the house. As far as the investigation was concerned, she heard little and didn’t demand to know more, believing if the department had significant news, the department would tell her. Looking back, she wondered if she should have “pushed the issue.” She also wondered if during those first several years after the murder the department had done enough. Everybody seemed to know who killed Jim. So why couldn’t they make the arrests and secure the convictions and put that part of their lives to rest?
One day in late 1994, Tom Hauser from Channel Five showed up at her door. He told Jeanette about locating Connie Trimble, then videotaped Jeanette paging through her scrapbook and asking for closure. “He brought the story alive,” she said later about Hauser’s telecast, “and we had high hopes.” But then weeks passed and stretched into years, and the terrible month of May would come and go again with nothing new to report.
Glen Kothe was a forty-eight-year-old street sergeant when Ryan and Jones were killed. Both officers had worked for him. He and Ryan’s father went way back, and when Jones was having problems with one of his canines, Kothe’s second wife, Susan, who trained dogs for a living, helped him out. That August morning, Kothe was a leader of the posse that arrived at the fish shack shortly after Jones and Laser were gunned down, and he watched as members of the Critical Incident Response Team shredded the flimsy structure with automatic weapons fire, unaware that the killer had slipped away and would elude them for another several minutes.
Later that day, following Guy Baker’s capture, Kothe happened to step out of a men’s room at St. Paul–Ramsey Hospital just as the bruised and bitten gunman was wheeled past on a gurney. Everybody froze. For a split second Kothe stared into the face of the presumed cop-killer while Baker’s escorts, a phalanx of St. Paul officers and sheriff’s deputies, stared at Kothe. Baker did not know Kothe, let alone his story, but the other cops did. “You could see it on their faces,” Kothe said later. “They had no idea what I might do. I had no idea what I might do. I had two dead friends because of that dirtbag.” Before anyone had a chance to find out, his fellow officers moved swiftly around the gurney and backed Kothe away from the prisoner.
Twenty-four years after his partner’s murder, Kothe was still feeling the terror and stress of that night, though less and less with the passing of time. He had been one of the St. Paul officers who testified at Connie Trimble’s trial in 1972, reliving the event for the Rochester jury. Now the Ryan and Jones murders brought it all back again in a rush, as had, and would for as long as he lived, every news account of another murdered officer from around the country.
Kothe had gone back to work, transferred to K-9 duty, and eventually returned to regular patrol and a series of assignments. Fifteen years after his hire, he passed the sergeant’s exam with flying colors and would be number two on the lieutenant’s list when he retired in 1997. Some of his colleagues grumbled that because he had been Sackett’s partner he could do “pretty much what he wanted,” and Kothe would concede that at least for a while after the murder the administration handled him with care. But whatever he did, it would take him a long time to shake the worst of his demons.
He believed Jeanette Sackett, who was avoiding him at memorial services and on other occasions that put them in the same room, blamed him for Jim’s death, which he said he accepted as “only natural.” “I could understand that,” he said. “‘Why my husband, and not you?’” (Though she insisted she never thought that.) In the absence of any formal counseling or guidance, Kothe would occasionally talk to a few of his buddies in the department about personal matters, though “sharing feelings” was not something men of his generation, let alone men of stout “German-Bohunk stock,” as he described his pedigree, were comfortable doing. “Men don’t cry,” he explained. “That’s the way I was brought up.” Meantime, he had developed a reputation among his colleagues because of the risks he was taking on the job. He refused to wear a protective vest when kicking down a suspect’s door, and he would join in car chases with the recklessness of a terrier on a squirrel.
“I’d go out of my way to get in the middle of something,” he said. “Somebody would give me lip, I’d knock them on their ass. There were some complaints, the usual stuff, but I never went too far. Obviously, though, I became a little bit nuts. Actually, a whole hell-of-a-lot nuts. Which I kind of promoted up to a point, figuring the brass would leave me alone. Like, ‘Don’t fuck with him. He’s crazy.’”
In the early seventies a Los Angeles cop, Joseph Wambaugh, wrote a best-selling book called The Onion Field about the 1963 murder of an LAPD officer named Ian Campbell by a couple of smalltime thugs. Kothe identified, at least in part, with Karl Hettinger, Campbell’s partner, who couldn’t deal with the guilt and blame he experienced as the murder’s survivor and who eventually left the department. Kothe never considered quitting, though he was not entirely sure why not. He drank too much. His wife divorced him. And there were times when his dark thoughts sought extreme remedies. One night, maybe ten years after Sackett’s murder, he sat in his truck and stared down the barrel of his pistol before finally deciding not to pull the trigger. After the Ryan and Jones murders, the department brought in a psychologist to debrief the shaken troops. Kothe was also asked to speak to his colleagues from the perspective of his own experience. At lunch, the psychologist asked how he was dealing with his past. Kothe told the man that, among other things, he thought and dreamed about his partner’s murder only in black and white. The psychologist told him that was not unusual after such a trauma, but that in the cases with which he was familiar the condition lasted only a few years, not almost twenty-five as it had with Kothe. The two continued to talk, and Kothe sat down with the man for two or three one-on-one sessions, which Kothe believed were helpful.
Beyond his conversations with detectives immediately following the murder, Kothe played no formal role in the Sackett investigation, at the time or later. When asked about the ambush, he would consistently recount the basics: their arrival in front of 859 Hague, the lack of response at the front door, his attempt to get an answer at the back door, the barking dog, the shouted warning to Sackett, the flash and explosion, Jim’s scream. He continued to believe the shot originated near the Hague and Victoria intersection (as opposed to some point down the block), which was where he placed the blast in the neat schematic he sketched for his supervisors the night of the murder.
As the years passed and his dreams and recollections regained their color, Kothe never added to or subtracted from his account, at least not when anyone was recording it. No suspect or witness ever emerged from a suppressed memory—though he would swear he saw Connie Trimble standing alongside a man who might have been Ronald Reed in the crowd that gathered across the street after the shooting. That, of course, contradicted Trimble’s trial testimony and was never corroborated by any other officer at the scene.
Tom Dunaski was a year older than Glen Kothe but four years behind him in department seniority. He was still a year and a half away from his first police academy class when Jim Sackett was murdered. He didn’t know Sackett and would learn only later that they were shirt-tail relatives and that Sackett had sat behind his sister in one of their classes at Johnson High.
Rare among St. Paul cops, Dunaski had neither a father, brother, nor cousin in the police department, past or present. Like many city cops, however, Dunaski was a bred-in-the-bone East Sider, and, when he was a kid, he looked up to an officer, George St. Sauver, who lived in the neighborhood. Dunaski’s father was for most of his working life a foreman at Minnesota Box and Lumber, a respected and resourceful man who could do almost anything with his hands; his mother worked at the Emporium department store downtown, raised Tom and his sister, and cooked big dinners after Mass on Sunday. After graduating from Hill (now Hill-Murray) Catholic High School in 1962, Dunaski served three years in the Army, then returned home and became an apprentice in the sheet-metal trade.
Five years later Dunaski achieved journeyman’s status, upon which, to his parents’ surprise, he decided to become a cop. He had become a competent “tinner” and enjoyed the work, but he had married and become a father and, like many of his contemporaries, was attracted by the kind of job security and insurance benefits the police department offered, plus the opportunity to do something interesting and important with his life. He drew on the positive example of Officer St. Sauver and the encouragement of a couple of cops who provided security and traffic control at St. Casimir’s Catholic Church, where he’d worked part-time as a janitor while apprenticing. “They were nice guys,” he recalled years later. “They’d say, ‘Go ahead, take the test. You’d make a good cop.’” The clincher was the robust endorsement of his next-door neighbor, an officer named Bill MacDonald, who had been a cop in Duluth and White Bear Lake before joining the St. Paul force (and serving with Jim Sackett). With all that wind at his back, he passed the department’s entrance exam and became a proud part of the class of 1971.
Decades later, Dunaski laughed when he thought about the reassuring words he had heard from the cops at St. Casimir’s. “They’d say, ‘Yeah, I didn’t have to take my gun out more than once or twice in twenty years.’ Well, when my class came on, guys were working twelve-hour days, wearing helmets, and sitting behind plastic shields, sometimes riding four to a car.” The St. Casimir cops had spent most of their careers in the traffic unit and administration. Dunaski’s class was facing riotous antiwar demonstrations at the University of Minnesota and the constant churn among disaffected youth on the Hill.
A beat cop named Fred Leske (“a roofer originally”) showed the young officers around and introduced them to the denizens of the Hill. The East Side could count the number of African Americans on one hand when Dunaski was growing up, but he had gotten to know black soldiers in the Army and black business people while doing metalwork in the Summit-University neighborhood. “You learned how to deal with the people up there,” he said. “You learned how to be civil, to be respectful.” He knew that every cop didn’t share that approach, that there were racists, bullies, and just plain bad apples in St. Paul’s department as in every police department, and that even in St. Paul there had been enough of them and enough history going way back to help explain the distrust and hatred that made conditions dangerous for everyone.
Dunaski, like every other cop in the city, knew the story of the Sackett assassination, and because of revised department procedures and his own developing street sense was careful not only to get to know the Hill but to watch his back when he was up there.
In 1989, after fifteen years on the job, Dunaski, now a sergeant, was assigned to the joint FBI-police task force created to combat the alarming growth of local gangs, the organized drug trade, and the violent crime that accompanied it. He had already distinguished himself as a particularly able detective in the department’s vice and special investigations units, with what would become a near-legendary reputation for tenacity and an ability to get people to talk.
Now in his middle forties, Dunaski was a rugged-looking man of average size, with a pink prizefighter’s face, a toothy grin, and the raw, raspy voice of a longtime cigarette smoker, though Dunaski hadn’t smoked much since he was in the service. He talked loud, fast, and often, in the funny, coarse, sometimes jumbled syntax of the East Side tinner he used to be. He smiled a lot and loved to laugh, but he was not, by the look and sound of him, the kind of guy a miscreant would want to cross. He was, conversely, the kind of guy a great number of miscreants decided they wanted to please.
Married and the father of three children, including a mentally disabled daughter, Dunaski had developed a sprawling extended family of sorts during his years as a vice squad investigator, dealing with prostitutes, drug users, and assorted sketchy characters. He loved working on the street, with one of a handful of partners over the years, more or less (as he chose to see it) his own boss. He made plenty of busts, but just as assiduously he made friends, many of whom became trusted informants and the core of his “intelligence base.” He became famous, in the process, for kindnesses that often transcended the possibility of a practical payoff. He and his partners would buy Santa Bears and Cabbage Patch Dolls for the children of young hookers. When a prostitute they knew was murdered, he and partner Gary Bohn bought a dress for her funeral. He was known to bring confidential informants over to his house before his wife, Charlene, would open a garage sale to the public so the CI’s could get first pick of the toys for their kids and take what they wanted for nothing.
Once he brought leftovers from his mother’s Thanksgiving dinner to a contact who was working outdoors as a private security guard on a brutally cold night. The young man, who was selling drugs when Dunaski first met him, had only a flimsy jacket and nowhere to warm up, so Dunaski and his brother-in-law drove back in separate cars with a snowmobile suit, heavy gloves, and a pair of Sorel boots for his shivering friend. He even left his car so the young man would have a place to sit down and warm up. Making a point of noting the mileage on the odometer, he said, only partly joking, “I better not find out tomorrow that this car was involved in a drug deal or a stickup.” Many years later, the young man, who had apparently turned his life around, was still checking in with Dunaski, always making sure to call and say hello on Thanksgiving.
On another occasion, a young woman Dunaski was working with told him she was afraid that her abusive boyfriend would track her down in the hospital, where she had just given birth, and try to snatch their newborn baby. With the woman’s permission, Dunaski took the baby back to his house, where he and Charlene looked after it for a few days, and in the meantime had what he ominously called a “little chitchat” with the boyfriend, “just to let him know what the situation was.”
“You work with people over the years, you develop a trust and a relationship, and they’ll do anything for you,” Dunaski once explained. “The books say that’s taboo—you don’t get that close to your CI’s. But sometimes you do.” Not all of the hundreds of such relationships lasted or bore investigative fruit, but many did. Even after his retirement in 2009, Dunaski was still talking to sources he had known for decades, “some [of whom] are now quite old.”
A high-profile case that began with an execution-style murder in June 1990 relied on informants of another kind, who were equally valuable to Dunaski and his colleagues.
The smoldering body of a twenty-six-year-old Los Angeles drug dealer named Duon Walker was found in an alley behind Iglehart Avenue near I-94. Walker had been shot three times in the head, then set on fire. It took St. Paul police two weeks just to identify the body, which had been moved to the Iglehart location from an unknown site. Though Joe Corcoran’s homicide crew soon established connections between Walker and two other men, including St. Paul businessman Kenneth Jones, who was known to deal cocaine, no one was talking and the investigation hit a dead end. A year after Walker’s murder, the Organized Crime–Drug Task Force working out of the FBI’s St. Paul office took over the case. Dunaski, John Culhane, and FBI agent Grant Beise—with access to the feds’ deep pockets and state-of-the-art surveillance resources—began their own probe.
It took five years, the work of scores of support staff, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, but the task force detectives finally secured the arrests of Jones and suspected hit man Jeffrey Barnes. Wiretaps and other electronic surveillance provided some of the evidence, but the key was the testimony of several difficult individuals who had been snared on federal drug charges and turned into informants and cooperative witnesses. Convicted in 1996 of “murder in furtherance of a continuing criminal enterprise” (Jones’s cocaine trade), Jones and Barnes were both sentenced to life in federal prison. As a bonus, the investigation resulted in dozens of other narcotics-related arrests and convictions.
The long and expensive case was groundbreaking for several reasons, not least because it was the first time the U.S. Attorney’s office in Minneapolis had successfully prosecuted a continuing criminal enterprise murder and because it made ad hoc teammates of Tom Dunaski and Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Paulsen.
The tenacious detective and the fastidious prosecutor collaborated on several of the most infamous local cold cases of the 1990s. At the time, the concept of the cold case was novel. Most murders were solved quickly, within a few weeks if not days or hours, or they were not solved at all. Evidence disappeared and witnesses forgot what they saw, were scared silent, moved away, or died. Budgets were tight, and there were only so many hours in a detective’s day. Unsolved murders were abandoned for fresher cases where evidence, witnesses, often even the murderer himself were there on the premises when the police arrived. With more elastic criminal statutes and the introduction of DNA technology and other advanced forensic tools, however, the cold case had become solvable, or at least somewhat more likely to be solved than it used to be.
When the five Coppage children were murdered in February 1994, St. Paul investigators swiftly identified members of the 6–0 Tre Crips gang as likely suspects. But witnesses were intimidated, hard evidence was nonexistent, and the case seemed likely to languish, despite public outrage. But over the next few years, Dunaski and his team, again using the looming sword of federal drug charges, persuaded several witnesses to testify against two gang leaders, Robert G. (“Buster”) and Robert J. (“Duddy”) Jefferson, and Paulsen secured indictments of the half-brothers on federal racketeering charges. All told, twenty-two persons associated with the 6–0 Tre Crips were indicted on charges ranging from criminal conspiracy to attempted murder, with the prospect of long federal prison terms. All but six pleaded guilty and many agreed to testify for the prosecution. Both Jeffersons received life sentences in late 1998.
In July 1996, four-year-old Davisha Brantley-Gillum was shot while sitting in the back seat of a car parked at a gas station off I-94. She died of her wounds, and her pregnant mother and another woman were injured. Once more, it didn’t take investigators long to figure out what happened. Davisha and her mother had been caught in the line of fire when members of one gang attempted to ambush members of another. But again authorities were stymied by the unwillingness of witnesses to break the gangsters’ code of silence. And again Dunaski and his colleagues worked their contacts on the street, then leveraged federal drug charges to draw out crucial information and essential testimony from gang members. In late 2002, three men—Timothy McGruder, Kamil Johnson, and Keith Crenshaw—were sentenced to life terms without the chance of parole. As it did against the 6–0 Tre Crips, the prosecution also brought the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute to bear against the Rolling 60s gang, empowering the government to seize assets illegally acquired by the defendants.
Years later, Paulsen gave Dunaski, who had become a close friend, the lion’s share of the credit for breaking those cases. “He’s rough and tough on the outside, but he really has a heart of gold,” Paulsen said. “That’s one of the reasons he’d get through to people who ordinarily don’t trust cops. Early on, when I first knew him, he called me—it was a Saturday—and said we couldn’t meet as we had planned because he had this informant whose car he was going to help fix. How many cops will spend their weekend helping an informant fix his car? And not because it’s for some quid pro quo, but because he has a relationship with the guy and actually cares about him. He told me, ‘I’d like to see the guy be able to drive to work so he doesn’t have to rob a liquor store.’
“Any witness who was worried about his safety or whatever, Tom was there for him,” Paulsen continued. “That’s how you get people to come forward. It’s about taking care of them in the big sense of the word. Even in the cases where we used the stick more than the carrot—the Coppage fire-bombing, for instance. Those people were really ruthless, and nobody was going to tell us what happened because nobody wanted to be the next Andre Coppage, whose house they burned down. So we decided early on the only way we were going to solve that one was to wrap up the whole gang, indict the whole gang, get them all in the same boat where they’ve got no choice but to give it up. It won’t be just one person going out on a limb, it will be nine or ten. The bad guys will be locked up federally and they’re not getting out.
“But even when we got to the point where we could bring those guys in—a guy like Frank Adams, the enforcer, as tough a gangster as you’ll ever meet—breaking through his armor could not have been done by the average detective, certainly not by the prosecutor. It had to be done by Dunaski going over [to the Ramsey County jail], spending time with him, and finally pushing through that hard exterior.”
Racial differences were usually not a barrier, Paulsen said. “Somehow Tom was able to talk to people of different backgrounds and races on their level.”
Tom Dunaski was tying up loose ends on the Davisha Gillum case—helping Jeff Paulsen build the case for trial, writing thank-you notes and letters of commendation for persons who had assisted with the investigation—when someone brought up the coldest of local cold cases: the assassination of Patrolman Sackett. It’s impossible to know who first mentioned the case to whom in the wake of the successful cold-case prosecutions that would conclude with the Gillum convictions. Neil Nelson, who was planning to leave the homicide squad when he assured unit commander Nancy DiPerna that the Sackett case was “solvable,” albeit requiring a “full-time commitment,” might be as good a guess as any.
DiPerna was reviewing a number of cold cases for possible investigation. Deciding which of several possibilities to pursue was a dicey occupation in its own right. Cold cases were by definition extremely difficult, demanding big-time allocations of money and manpower, so the odds of actually solving one had to be better than nil. Raw sentiment—as in the case of a murdered police officer—was not enough to justify reopening an investigation, though it doubtless helped; there must be sound reasons why seasoned investigators believe they can succeed where their predecessors failed. It wouldn’t hurt, of course, to have the wealth and reach of the federal government involved, too.
In a meeting on July 1, 2002, DiPerna brought up the Sackett case with Dunaski and two other members of the FBI-police task force, Jane Mead and Robert Kosloske. When DiPerna asked them if they thought the case was solvable, Dunaski said, “Sure.” And with his barking laugh, he added, “Then we’ll find Jimmy Hoffa.”
Ignoring the reference to the long-missing Teamster boss, DiPerna asked what it would take for the task force to go after Sackett’s killers. She and Dunaski were longtime colleagues and friends; they both knew that departmental bureaucracy had a way of bogging down investigations. “Not being called in every week to find out where we’re at and what we’re doing,” he replied to her question. The state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension had recently established a hundred-thousand-dollar “Spotlight on Crime” fund (supported in part by Minneapolis-based Target Corporation and other companies). With that money in mind, Dunaski also said he wanted enough cash for confidential informants “so we don’t have to go through five different channels to pay off a CI.”
The FBI’s approval was required, as well as Chief Finney’s, both of which were quickly forthcoming. Finney’s go-ahead was, typical of his twelve-year administration, a source of contention. Some in the department said he was pushing for a solution to the Sackett case so he could share in the credit before he retired (he planned to step down in 2004). Members of the African American community, including many of Finney’s lifelong friends and supporters, reacted with dismay, wondering why, after nearly thirty-five years and a trial that ended in an acquittal, the chief would want to open old wounds. Summit-University was not the place it was in 1970, but the chasm between black residents and the still predominantly white police department remained deep and perilous. As self-assured and combative as ever, Finney—who had been chief when officers Ryan and Jones were killed—emphatically rejected the criticism of both sides, telling a journalist a few years later, “It was about solving the case of a St. Paul police officer who had been assassinated. I said, ‘We know who did it. Let’s bring them to trial. And let’s do it right, so they don’t get away this time.’ [The critics] never understood that about me. It wasn’t about credit or politics or the racial stuff. We had a dead cop here.”
Dunaski, for his part, had reservations, at least momentarily. What were his chances of solving the case if Neil Nelson and Gerry Bohlig, two of the finest investigators he knew, not to mention Earl Miels, Cecil Westphall, Tom Opheim, Carolen Bailey, Russ Bovee, and the other detectives at the time of the murder, hadn’t been able to crack it? Sackett would surely be the most challenging investigation of a career filled with challenging investigations. But whatever his incentives for taking on Sackett, one would undoubtedly be exactly that: the greatest challenge of his professional life. Nelson said, “Tom, I’m telling you, even though this is ancient history, it’s solvable. There are people out there who know what happened.” Whether Dunaski really believed the “solvable” part at the time is debatable.
Dunaski’s team at the moment comprised only one other investigator, Sergeant Jane Mead, who was also on loan from the St. Paul department and designated a Special Federal Officer. Their “case,” so far as they could actually put their hands on it, consisted of a couple of cardboard boxes full of scribbled notes, typewritten reports, and newspaper clippings, plus a few reel-to-reel recording tapes and an ancient Dictabelt in a manila evidence envelope.
But that would have to be enough to get them started.